Real Actions to Save Our Sound

The Puget Sound Partnership’s 2020 Action Agenda due this December is our ‘last, best chance’ to save Puget Sound (The Olympian, 2/18/08).

The Partnership and its Leadership Council say they need to know what people think priority actions and benchmarks in protecting and restoring the Sound should be.

 In 2006, when the same question was asked, four themes emerged from public workshops around the Sound:

•    Educate people about the Sound

•    Enforce existing laws and regulations

•    Put real money into doing the job right

•    Take meaningful action now on our hardest problems

Read more here about funding, enforcment and accountability.

•    Station a rescue tug year round at Neah Bay and develop a network of tugs around the Sound to prevent oil spill catastrophe. Read more.

•    Require all new development to conform to low-impact development standards. Read more.

•    Restore to health 50 miles of nearshore habitat and 50 miles of streams every year. Read more.

•    Require new “soft” shoreline armoring instead of concrete bulkheads. Read more.

•    Ban “mixing zones” for toxic chemicals. Read more.

•    Clean up failing septic systems and require new systems to remove nutrients

•    Set instream water flow rules to protect fish and wildlife

•    Number of acres of shellfish beds cleaned up every year

•    Number of acres of wetlands restored every year

•    Number of polluted waterways reduced every year

•    Number of tons on toxics chemicals entering the Sound reduced every year

•    Number of acres of toxic sediment sites cleaned up every year

•    Number of gallons of reduced stormwater flow to the Sound every year

•    Number of acres of dead zones in Puget Sound

•    Number of stream-miles restored to fish passage

Tell the Puget Sound Partnership what you think: Speak up for real actions to restore the Sound to health.

It’s Your Puget Sound.

 YOUR PARTICIPATION AND INVOLVEMENT IN DEVELOPING THE ACTION AGENDA IS ESSENTIAL.

Here are three ways you can participate on a regular basis between now and December 1, 2008:

Be a S.O.S post card captain this summer. Our goal is to generate 3,000 postcards by the end of the summer. To do that, we need 200 volunteer postcard captains who can commit to getting at least 15 friends or neighbors to sign postcards, It’s easy. It’s empowering. It’s exciting. Jump in here. 

Attend the mid July Partnership Action Area workshop (see schedule here)  near you to provide  your input on what the priority actions need to be . Let us know how it goes by emailing us.

 Submit your comments and ideas via People For Puget Sound web site; we will deliver your comment sheet to the Partnership.

To be a post card captain or if you plan on attending the mid July Action Area workshops, please contact Rein Attemann, 206.382.7007.

More information is available on the Partnership’s web site